Pod Insights Freakonomics Radio 290. He’s One of the Most Famous Political Operatives in America. America Just Doesn’t Know It Yet. About this episode Steve Hilton was the man behind David Cameron's push to remake British politics. Things didn't work out so well there. Now he's trying to launch a new political revolution – from sunny California.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:30 Stephen J. Dubner? Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner. Our brand-new episode will start in a minute. But first, as you know, Freakonomics Radio listeners are a big part of Freakonomics Radio. A lot of our story ideas come from you guys, like this one.
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4:18 Speaker 02 Steve Hilton, you've talked about democracy malfunctioning.
4:21 Stephen J. Dubner? ...who rose from humble immigrant beginnings to join the elite.
4:25 Speaker 03 I've actually met these fancy people.
4:27 Stephen J. Dubner? ...who became close friends with, and ultimately, senior advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron.
4:33 Speaker 03 I basically was responsible for the implementation of our domestic policy reform program.
4:39 Stephen J. Dubner? A man who became disillusioned with his position.
4:42 Speaker 03 What typically happens in government is the exact opposite of how things should work.
4:45 Stephen J. Dubner? ...who became disillusioned with his boss.
4:47 Speaker 03 And we wanted him to make this speech, and he always agreed. He said, "Yes, good idea. We'll do it. We'll do it." He never made that speech.
4:54 Stephen J. Dubner? And who, after two years in 10 Downing Street, left his job?
4:58 Speaker 03 Looking back on it, that's because I wasn't doing my job properly.
5:01 Stephen J. Dubner? He decamped to California with his family.
5:04 Speaker 03 And I didn't really have anything planned for my next move.
5:06 Stephen J. Dubner? But now he's found a new political mission.
5:09 Speaker 03 We want to end the way that big money donors dominate politics.
5:13 Stephen J. Dubner? It's a mission that includes a new TV talk show.
5:16 Speaker 03 I'd love to have Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump together. How amazing would that be?
5:20 Stephen J. Dubner? It's the story of a man who sided against his old friend and boss in the biggest vote of all.
5:26 Speaker 03 Well, we haven't been in touch since the Brexit vote, so I think there's not much to say beyond that.
5:34 Stephen J. Dubner? A man whose life has regularly intersected with unwanted attention.
5:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, you're getting very Daily Mail at this point. I think that, I'm not sure this is the tone of the conversation that we should be having.
5:46 Stephen J. Dubner? Let's have it anyway. Steve Hilton, the most famous political operative in America that no one in America knows about. Not yet, at least.
6:06 Speaker 04 From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
6:24 Stephen J. Dubner? When David Cameron became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 2010, his administration adopted two primary missions. Number one, drag Britain out of the worst economic ditch since the Great Depression. And number two, change what his Conservative Party and really all of government, change what it stood for, especially in its interactions with actual people. The fiscal mission was largely the purview of George Osborne, Cameron's Chancellor of the Exchequer. And it was Steve Hilton, an iconoclastic former ad man, who steered mission number two. Hilton essentially wanted to decentralize central government from within central government. Some of his wishes were in line with what Americans think of
7:07 Stephen J. Dubner? as conservatism: fewer regulations and top-down government directives, reforming welfare and privatizing some public services. But on social issues and things like energy and the environment, Hilton, like David Cameron, was a progressive. The implicit promise? Smarter, smaller government with cleaner, greener, and kinder results, a very "you can have it all" package. Alas, much of Britain was having none of it, either within Whitehall or beyond. The Cameron administration had its share of victories, but it was seen as veering between new-age spin-doctoring and old-fashioned government tone deafness. In the press, Steve Hilton took a lot of the heat. He was portrayed as a Rasputin and a true believer in lost causes.
7:51 Stephen J. Dubner? After just two years in office, he took what Downing Street called a "one-year sabbatical", but it became permanent. A piece in The Economist lamented his departure. It praised Hilton's efforts to, quote, "open up Britain's Napoleonic state to people power."
8:09 Speaker 03 I found it massively intensely frustrating most of the time. And this is where I, when I reflect on it, I think that, you know, most of that was my fault in the sense that I approached it in exactly the wrong way.
8:22 Stephen J. Dubner? To understand what Hilton now considers the right way, we should start at the beginning.
8:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, so my parents are Hungarian. My father, actually, who passed away many, many years ago, but he was actually, the interesting thing about him was he was the goalkeeper for the Hungarian National Ice Hockey Team.
8:36 Stephen J. Dubner? No.
8:36 Speaker 03 Yes, he was a big sports star in Hungary. And he met my mom, actually, in the UK. But they split up, and my stepfather is also Hungarian. So my whole family background is from Hungary.
8:49 Stephen J. Dubner? And you're named for your stepfather, your father Hilton comes from Herschek, is it?
8:53 Speaker 03 Herschek, yes, very good research you've got going on there, yes.
8:57 Stephen J. Dubner? We try, but that's your biological father's name or your stepfather's name? I'm just curious.
9:01 Speaker 03 My biological father's name, and then they made it easier to say by picking Hilton.
9:05 Stephen J. Dubner? And I understand it's apocryphal that the name was chosen for the first hotel that they stayed at.
9:11 Speaker 03 Yes, they didn't really, yes, that's not true. I don't think they could have.
9:15 Stephen J. Dubner? So you grew up in London area then?
9:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, for the first couple of years, but really I grew up in a town called Brighton on the south coast of England, yeah.
9:22 Stephen J. Dubner? Okay, so talk about growing up there and then your schooling. I understand you did very well at an earlier level and won a scholarship to a very good school.
9:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's an amazing school actually called Christ Hospital. It's a charity and most of the kids there don't pay any fees. It's a charitable foundation and in fact are selected on the basis of some kind of social need, so from inner city areas of various kinds. So actually it's a really weird institution because it's a boarding school in the middle of the English countryside, as far removed as you could imagine from the inner city. And yet it's got incredibly diverse kids, you know, from all different backgrounds and races and colors, all just mixed together, wearing this very weird uniform that dates back to the 16th century. It's just totally bizarre.
10:08 Stephen J. Dubner? You went on to Oxford, which let's say was probably a little bit less diverse.
10:11 Speaker 03 Well, I tell you what was diverse for me about it was that I met rich people for the first time and that was really interesting for me.
10:20 Stephen J. Dubner? At Oxford, Hilton enrolled in the famous PPE program, Philosophy, Politics and Economics, the foundation of many political careers. Indeed, future Conservative Party heavyweights David Cameron and Boris Johnson were there a few years ahead of Hilton, but he didn't meet them there. Here's how Hilton got involved in the Conservative Party. One summer during university, he had such a boring job shuffling around insurance files that he applied for a different job he saw advertised on television.
10:47 Speaker 03 In the UK, you don't have political advertising. You have these things called party political broadcasts where the political party get free airtime on the main channels. And I remember just sort of catching one and at the end, there was this very posh guy who was the chairman of the Conservative Party. I just remember him saying at the end, if we want to help the Conservative Party, write to me, Peter Brook. I really remember it. I mean, this must have been about 30 years ago. Write to me, Peter Brook at Conservative Central Office. And I thought, you know what, maybe they have some interesting jobs. And that's how I got into that. It was completely accidental.
11:18 Stephen J. Dubner? I see. So this was the Conservative Central Office, it's called, is that right?
11:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think they now call it something else Conservative Headquarters. It's the party headquarters.
11:26 Stephen J. Dubner? Okay, so you basically land this job via the equivalent of what we would think of here as like advertisement on a matchbook, right? And in that job, you meet David Cameron, the future Prime Minister and your future colleague and boss, and your future wife Rachel Whitstone, is that right?
11:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:43 Stephen J. Dubner? And then there would be many, many entanglements, among them the fact that you and Rachel eventually would become godfather to his and his wife's first child, who tragically died very young.
11:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:56 Stephen J. Dubner? David Cameron would become godfather to one of your children, if I have it right.
12:01 Speaker 03 That's right, yeah.
12:02 Stephen J. Dubner? And there are other entanglements along the way, including before you were married, that your future wife had an affair with David Cameron's father-in-law? I'm getting this right as well?
12:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, you're getting very Daily Mail at this point, I think.
12:15 Stephen J. Dubner? Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
12:16 Speaker 03 I'm not sure this is the tone of the conversation that we should be having.
12:21 Stephen J. Dubner? Now, she comes from what sounds to be an interesting family. Her parents were involved in politics. I understand that Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek would have dinner at her parents' home. I don't know if that's true, but I'm curious to know a little bit more about her background.
12:35 Speaker 03 I think that is true, yeah. Her grandfather, who I'm probably, I'm going to be shocked for getting this wrong, but I think this is, I think the story is that he was an Air Force pilot in the Second World War and came back and also was a businessman. I think he was the person that brought sort of industrialized chicken farming to the UK or something like that, yeah, after having seen it in America.
12:57 Stephen J. Dubner? Interesting, and you now keep chickens in your backyard, don't you? Although you've deindustrialized the chicken process.
13:02 Speaker 03 Very deindustrialized, exactly. But the, and I think this is what happened. He read Hayek's famous book, The Road to Serfdom, and was inspired by it. And that book argues that the, basically that the measures that were undertaken to win the war, the kind of centralization of the economy and the growth of government would inexorably lead To the enslavement of society and that the growth of big government had to be checked.
13:28 Stephen J. Dubner? So did Rachel grow up?
13:29 Speaker 03 Well, there's a nice story. Actually, he went to see Hayek, who at that time, I think, was teaching at the LSE, London School of Economics, and said, I've read your book. I think it's great. I want to help put these ideas into practice. I'm going to run for Parliament as a Conservative MP. And Hayek said to him, if you really want to change things, don't do that, because the first thing you have to do is win the battle of ideas. So don't go into Parliament. The better use of your time and money and effort would be to set up a think tank. So that's exactly what he did. And so Rachel's grandfather set up the Institute of Economic Affairs, which became the kind of powerhouse think tank for free market thinking in the UK and actually around the world, and really incubated a lot of the ideas that then Margaret Thatcher adopted and implemented as Prime Minister.
14:16 Stephen J. Dubner? Even though Hilton is talking here about his wife's grandfather, he could be talking about himself. He has come to believe that industrialization and institutionalism, especially as they intersect with government, are essentially a drag on humankind. He recently wrote a book about this. It's called More Human. "We have designed and built a world that is inhuman," he writes. "In governments the world over, political leaders preside frustrated and impotent over vast bureaucratic systems that routinely disappoint and leave citizens in rage that they can't control what affects their lives." Hilton complains that our food, our education, our healthcare are, quote, "provided by anonymous, distant, industrialized
15:00 Stephen J. Dubner? machines." Now, how did he come to hold these views?
15:03 Speaker 03 Straight out of college, I worked at the Conservative Party, but that was just a couple of years. And then I left and worked at an ad agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, where, amongst other things, I learnt business, basically, and also did a lot of elections and kind of public advocacy campaigns around the world, including an anti-racism campaign in the UK that then gave me the idea for my next move, which was to start a company called Good Business, which was a corporate responsibility consulting firm.
15:30 Stephen J. Dubner? That lasted another seven or eight years.
15:33 Speaker 03 And there, we worked for some of the biggest companies in the world, trying to advise them on how to improve their social and environmental impact. And that intersection between business and social and community issues and environmental issues, I think that really informed a lot of what I then tried to bring to the project of modernizing the British Conservative Party.
15:54 Stephen J. Dubner? Hilton's reentry into conservative politics came in 2005. He wanted to run for Parliament, but lost out in the selection process. He was, however, offered a job by his old friend, David Cameron, now in his late 30s. Cameron was a member of Parliament with designs on being elected leader of the Conservative Party.
16:13 Speaker 03 And we ran this really great insurgent campaign where he really was based on his character and his optimism and sense that you could put together a positive account of what conservatism ought to represent in the modern age, really understanding the problems of today, but applying conservative solutions.
16:33 Stephen J. Dubner? Cameron won that contest and, of course, the larger one, five years later, to serve as Prime Minister. Hilton was central to these victories and he became perhaps even more central once Cameron moved into Downing Street.
16:47 Stephen J. Dubner? You personally, Steve Hilton, became known, at least in the media, as a figure that's really not so uncommon in American politics as well, but maybe more pronounced. You were considered brilliant, occasionally devious, plenty of enemies. You spoke your mind. You did not stand on protocol. You liked to not wear shoes. You liked to not dress up the way that most government officials and aides typically dress up and behave. And you seem to have a kind of, I mean this to sound positive, a kind of ruthlessness for accomplishing an agenda. Talk about what those first couple of years being in the administration were
17:28 Stephen J. Dubner? like, what you felt was going well and what you felt wasn't going well.
17:34 Speaker 03 Well, I think that what went well was the leadership that David Cameron particularly provided in terms of stabilizing the economy, basically. I think that at the time he took office, the country was in a really dire predicament and people were incredibly anxious about what would happen. And pretty quickly, he established this sense of orderly calm over the situation and I think achieved, in a way, his main goal, which is to give the country kind of responsible stewardship. I think that's what he mainly saw the job as being and he absolutely delivered on that.
18:11 Stephen J. Dubner? Did you enjoy those first couple of years?
18:15 Speaker 03 Well, I'm not sure I'd choose the word enjoy. It's incredibly hard work, incredibly frustrating. It's an amazing privilege and honor. I mean, I know that sounds like a bit of a cliche, but it really is. Just to have that opportunity to work on problems that are real and try and make a difference in people's lives. I think one of the best, actually, was something that we introduced called National Citizen Service. And the idea of that was a kind of non-military national service for teenagers to try and create a sense of community cohesion and social mixing and bring people together from different backgrounds and also to a bit of personal development. So that's a specific thing where I can say, you know what, that really was something that I conceived with David Cameron right at the beginning and saw to its implementation. That's obviously very rewarding.
19:03 Stephen J. Dubner? National Citizen Service was a quintessential Hilton idea, that is, government using its leverage to throw some organizational mojo back to its citizenry. It was part of a grand vision that he came to call Big Society.
19:17 Speaker 03 The argument went like this. Previous Conservative Party leaders had said, you know, the enemy is big government and we need to cut back government, to roll back the frontiers of the state, cut back the size of government, cut spending, and everything will be great. And- That certainly had its appeal, particularly in the UK in the, at the end of the 1970s, where people felt that the state really had got way too big and out of control. But as you went through the 80s, people saw that actually, if you just cut back government and left it at that, people were often left behind and social problems were unaddressed. And so, we tried to make a more nuanced argument than just saying, smaller government.
19:59 Speaker 03 We'd say, yes, we, we want, the answer to our problems is not big government, but a big society.
20:06 Stephen J. Dubner? David Cameron fully embraced the idea.
20:08 Speaker 05 The idea of the big society is trying to help individuals and communities and voluntary bodies to come together and find solutions to the problems that we have. So that's the big idea, is that you're looking for big society answers rather than big state answers.
20:24 Stephen J. Dubner? Among the cornerstones of big society, more power to local communities and institutions, including government and police, more volunteerism and support for all kinds of co-ops and social enterprises, also, a push to make government radically transparent by publishing more data. On paper, and in Steve Hilton's mind, the phrase "big society" was a winner, but to the opposition and the press, it was a touch too Orwellian.
20:54 Speaker 03 And then it became the subject of political argument and back and forth.
20:57 Stephen J. Dubner? Perception wasn't the only issue, there was also the need to execute.
21:00 Speaker 03 What typically happens in government is the exact opposite of how things should work. Instead of starting with real people and their needs and understanding how their lives work and putting together programs that are in touch with that and work with that, you go in, you're in a hurry, you want to make change happen, you're just sitting at the centre in an office with the levers of power and you just want to sort of steamroll your way through. And actually, that usually ends in massive waste of money and disappointing outcomes. And that is the story of every government, it seems to me, regardless of their political persuasions. I think there's a lot to learn.
21:34 Stephen J. Dubner? Hilton came to be seen as a bit of a hypocrite, talking up power to the people from within the ultimate corridor of power. It didn't help that he usually kept himself. Way out of public view.
21:46 Speaker 03 And so there definitely was a time when, you know, I was seen as a sort of shadowy, weird advisor, you know.
21:51 Stephen J. Dubner? Rasputin.
21:52 Speaker 03 That's all that kind of stuff was written. And I, and I think that during that time, there was a lot of misunderstanding. And particularly, I tell you what, I think, you know, there, there was a portrayal of me on one of these TV shows, I can't remember, is it The Thick of It? I can't remember.
22:06 Stephen J. Dubner? Yeah, it wa, it was The Thick of It.
22:08 Speaker 06 I spent 10 years detoxifying this party. It's been a bit like renovating an old, old house. Yeah? You can take out a sexist beam here, a callous window there, replace the odd homophobic roof tile. But after a while, you realize that this renovation is doomed because the foundations are built on what I can only describe as a solid bed of [BLEEP].
22:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly. It was funny and, you know, I get it and I laughed. But the thing that was, was really sort of wrong about that was that that character was just almost entirely focused on sort of presentation and how things look, whatever. And actually, I think that for, for a long time, that was how I was sort of seen, rather than actually what I really care about.
22:54 Stephen J. Dubner? Substance and policy.
22:55 Speaker 03 Exactly.
22:58 Stephen J. Dubner? Among the policies that Hilton cared about most, whether Britain would stay part of the European Union. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, his harsh difference with Cameron on that issue.
23:09 Speaker 03 I saw Brexit as an opportunity for the UK to be a really dynamic, open, pro-enterprise country engaged with the whole world.
23:17 Stephen J. Dubner? Also, we learn the unlikely site of Hilton's political reawakening.
23:22 Speaker 03 It's a place called the D-School. The D stands for design.
23:25 Stephen J. Dubner? We find out what he's up to these days and how his new TV show is a response to recent political events.
23:32 Speaker 03 That is a show that is going to focus on what I'm calling positive populism.
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25:41 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it, which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example? Well, PNC Bank did since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-YOLO type. PNC Bank: Brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.
26:31 Stephen J. Dubner? We're speaking today with Steve Hilton, the former chief strategist for British Prime Minister David Cameron. What's he doing now?
26:38 Speaker 03 I am the CEO and co-founder of CrowdPac, which is a political tech startup based in California. And I'm also the host of a new show on Fox News on Sunday evenings called The Next Revolution. And that is a show that is going to focus on what I'm calling positive populism, how we deal with the issues that have arisen as a result of the populist uprisings we've seen around the world, particularly in the UK with Brexit and here in America with Donald Trump's election in a positive way.
27:10 Stephen J. Dubner? Talking to Hilton, you begin to sense that these populist views on government aren't so different from his own views, although his really intensified while serving in Downing Street.
27:21 Stephen J. Dubner? You left Number 10 after a couple of years, moved to California with your family. According to The Washington Post, at least, you left Downing Street, quote, "after becoming disillusioned with Cameron's progress and the lack of boldness." I have no idea if that's true or not. Why don't you tell us?
27:36 Speaker 03 I mean, the immediate reason was a family one in the sense that Rachel, my wife, she was head of government relations and PR for Google. And she was commuting a lot, basically, from London to California, which is pretty tough. And then, once our second son was born, it just got really... So we decided to move. That was the immediate reason. But frankly, I think that description then that you read out is correct. But if I look back on it, I think that it really, it was my fault in the sense that I hadn't really figured out how to deliver for David Cameron the kind of revolution that we had promised. And to actually do that in a way
28:17 Speaker 03 that worked with the institutions and with the bureaucracy that we inherited, rather than just relentlessly attack them. And I think that that's my fault. So I definitely felt disillusioned at the time.
28:29 Stephen J. Dubner? Hilton and his wife, Rachel Whitstone, had been a very high-profile power couple in England. In California, not so much.
28:38 Speaker 03 I mean, that's not... We love it here. I love California. I think it's just the best place in the world.
28:42 Stephen J. Dubner? Whitstone was head of communications and public policy at Google for several years and left for a similar position at Uber. But she left that job quite abruptly and it was revealed soon after that a British watchdog agency was investigating whether her old friend David Cameron had improperly lobbied on Uber's behalf. Hilton, meanwhile, had met some people at Stanford.
29:05 Speaker 03 And from that arose the opportunity to teach there in various parts of the university and most importantly, at a place called the D School. The D stands for design. It's the Institute of Design at Stanford. And that really was, for me, a transformational experience.
29:22 Stephen J. Dubner? Transformational, but also bittersweet.
29:25 Speaker 03 If I'd have had the benefit of that experience before I had the privilege of working in government, I think I would have been 100 times more effective because if we adopted in government what's taught us at the D School, you know, human-centered design or design thinking, it's really simple. You start any project with an intense focus on the user. Who are you designing for? Who is supposed to benefit from this? And let's really understand their lives. Then you generate some ideas and before you do anything, you test them out. You turn them into a very cheap prototype that enables you to get feedback before you go to the expense of building anything or if the parallel is in government, before you actually start spending real money on implementing a program, you actually test it out with
30:10 Speaker 03 people, get reactions. And that process of rapid, low-cost prototyping and testing is totally absent from the way government operates. And if that was present, I really believe you would save so much wasted money and have so much more effective government programs.
30:28 Stephen J. Dubner? I guess where the parallel between, let's say, designing consumer products and designing policy seems to break down is the following. When you're a firm trying to come up with the right product for your consumers or your eventual consumers, you can do that kind of, you know, in your garage without a lot of scrutiny. When you're doing it in government, you have intense and constant scrutiny, both from the opposition party or parties and the media, which makes it harder to do things. Things like rapid prototyping and experimenting because you're always worried about, you know, the reductive form of your idea getting released to the media and being ridiculed
31:11 Stephen J. Dubner? or being shot down by someone else. So talk to me for a minute about whether you really think that model can work as well in society and politics as it can for something like designing, whether it's user experiences for a company like Uber or Google, two firms your wife has worked for, or something else.
31:29 Speaker 03 Government can do this, can really start to work out how better to address some of these problems in a very, very small and low-key way, literally with, you know, a couple of hundred people. You don't need to spend a fortune on some big pilot program that's announced in the media and then scrutinized. But actually, there's another point I want to make, which is you're so right about this, the way that the media climate, which is inevitable, by the way, I'm not complaining about it, it's just a fact of life, means that politicians and government officials are really risk averse when it comes to trying to bring forward innovations or even let experiments happen that you can learn from. And one of the things that really needs to happen is to try and change that culture. I remember we tried, for years, in
32:13 Speaker 03 the run-up to the 2010 general election, we tried to persuade David Cameron to make a speech where he would explicitly say, look, here's our agenda for reform. It includes trying lots of new things out, innovations that will bring forward new ways of dealing with problems. Inevitably, when we do that, things will go wrong. There will be failures as well as successes. We can't guarantee it. And we wanted him to make this speech to set up the fact and to give ourselves space for that kind of experimentation. And he always agrees, yes, good idea, we'll do it, we'll do it. He never made that speech.
32:50 Stephen J. Dubner? I mean, I can see why you wanted them to do it, and I can also see why it would be hard for him to do.
32:56 Speaker 03 Of course, and so you do get, there's a, there's a, there's real risk of, so you, you're just not going to get the innovation that you really need to solve some of these intractable problems that have been around for decades and don't seem to be getting any better.
33:07 Stephen J. Dubner? Well, let me ask you this, so your book, you address, you know, all the major realms, politics and governance and healthcare and education and the food system and so on. And you make the argument that they've all become too inhuman, too, were too distanced from the production of things, that bosses are too distant from what their workers are doing, that consumers are too distant from what producers are doing, and so on and so on. The central, I guess, paradox that strikes me is that the way you talk about something being inhuman is often, it strikes me, as a synonym essentially for being large. When institutions become large, that's what happens to them. And so I just wonder if you could talk about that paradox for a moment.
33:50 Stephen J. Dubner? When you have systems and institutions, including governments, inevitably, there are many layers. There's bureaucracy, which seems to be your chief villain. How can you have both? You don't want to get rid of, you know, 90% of the people on earth and go small scale. That would be a little bit cruel. So how can you have both?
34:08 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's a great, great analysis. And I think that what you described is exactly right in the sense that if I was to say, well, what is the theme that ties together the, the lack of humanity in the way government operates and the way businesses operate in the private sector and in the economy and social institutions? The thing that I keep coming back to is that I think that we've seen over the last few decades, far too great a concentration of power, both in government, where it's been progressively removed from local institutions and going more and more to central institutions at the national level, and even at the international level with institutions like the EU. But also in the economy, where you see the way that companies have just emerged and acquired
34:51 Speaker 03 and got bigger and bigger, and then you end up with these kind of ruthless global entities that, you know, in many ways do great work. And I'm, I'm very much a pro business. This person, but the way that they've just become so big and the power is so concentrated operates against the public interest and the individual interest. So I think we need to break up this concentration of power. Now, I don't present it as the absolute answer to every single problem, but I do think that we've gone far too much in the other direction. In the economy, for example, we need a far greater, much more aggressive anti-trust policy like we used to have many, many years ago. And over the last few decades, it's just got completely blown apart. And in government, we need to decentralize power.
35:36 Speaker 03 You know, let's see how we can try and make the default unit of governance actually the neighborhood, where people actually know each other and can relate to each other in human ways. Let's see if we can really decentralize in a very radical way so that people feel that they're in control of the stuff that really matters to them.
35:57 Stephen J. Dubner? To that end, in 2014, Hilton launched a for-profit company called CrowdPac, whose mission, he says,
36:04 Speaker 03 Is really to democratize politics, to give politics back to people, to make it easier for anyone to participate in politics, particularly on the sort of financial side of that. We want to end the way that big money donors dominate politics, the way that the party infrastructure means that it's very hard to run for office independently if you're not part of the establishment and the party system and prepared to take the money from the big donors. We want to change all that and make it easier for anyone to raise money, support candidates that they believe in, run for office, just participate in politics, organize, get involved without the traditional ways of doing that. So we're trying to open it all up.
36:48 Stephen J. Dubner? CrowdPac's nonpartisan platform seems designed to foster a new, less agitated form of populism than we've seen in politics the last few years, the sort of populism that led to the stunning Brexit vote last year.
37:01 Speaker 03 I mean, I was always in favor of leaving the European Union. So
37:05 Speaker 03 I did actually argue for that to be our policy.
37:07 Stephen J. Dubner? Why was Hilton in favor of Brexit?
37:10 Speaker 03 Well, to me, it's a consistent application of what I've always believed, which in a phrase is a bit of a cliche, but the phrase would be people power, that you know, people should have more control over the decisions that affect them. And one of the big things that's gone wrong is this centralization of power. And the EU is a great example of that. There were so many things that we came up against when we were, you know, trying to run domestic policy in the UK, where it's, well, you can't do that because the EU rules or directives stop you from doing it. And all sorts of areas where there's really no need for that to be a centralized function. In many ways, you know, the position of a member state of the EU is that it has less autonomy than a state within the USA has. But the difference is, at least in America, everyone complains about Washington, the federal government,
37:53 Speaker 03 but at least the president is elected, at least Congress is elected. In the EU situation, you've got a centralized bureaucracy that is really driving policy. People point to the European Parliament and so on, and the fact that representative elected governments sit on the council of ministers that make decisions in the EU. That's all true, but the driving force of policy initiation in the EU is the European Commission, which is an appointed body. And so to me, there's a sort of fundamental objection there, which is this is not democratic. And that means it's wrong, even if the outcomes may from time to time be good. Doesn't matter, it's not democratic, it's wrong.
38:33 Speaker 03 And I'm all in favor of a single market, which was the initial sort of idea that Britain signed up to. That's good and helpful. But when it turns into, as it has, a move towards a European government, but one that is not democratically accountable, then I can't support that, regardless of its actual impact, because I object on principle. They want a United States of Europe run from Brussels. Britain doesn't, and therefore you've got to just accept that reality and leave.
39:04 Stephen J. Dubner? It was David Cameron who called for a Brexit vote to be put to the British people, but he urged them to vote against it.
39:11 Speaker 05 I believe we are stronger, safer and better off inside a reformed European Union.
39:18 Speaker 05 And that is why I'll be campaigning with all my heart and soul to persuade the British people to remain.
39:23 Stephen J. Dubner? As we all know, Britain voted for Brexit and Cameron summarily stepped down as Prime Minister. So you came out in favor of Brexit during the referendum. And from what I understand, the relationship between the two of you was, to some degree, fractured. What's the shape and state of your relationship with David Cameron now?
39:46 Speaker 03 Well, we haven't been in touch since the Brexit vote, so I think there's not much to say beyond that.
39:54 Stephen J. Dubner? Yeah. Do you wish you had played that differently? Do you wish that you had consulted him differently or stood against him differently?
40:02 Speaker 03 No, I think that I said what I believe, and it was very different. It was just, it was a campaign, and you know, I had a pretty minor role in it.
40:11 Stephen J. Dubner? Although somehow you being the British, the former government guy, living in the States and coming back, seemed, it seemed as though the British media treated you, treated your voice as more significant than the people who'd been there all along. Maybe, maybe it was that, you know, you felt it important enough to come back to talk about it somehow, but it seemed as though your voice carried an awful lot of weight in that debate, don't you think?
40:34 Speaker 03 I tell you what I was, I was hoping to do, which is to put forward what I thought, to a certain extent, had been missing from the debate, which is a positive, optimistic argument for Brexit, right? Not the, you know, we don't want foreigners here, we don't want any immigration, we want to put, that's the exact opposite. I saw Brexit as an opportunity for the UK to be more open, more open to the whole of the world, not just the countries on the UK's doorstep, to be a really dynamic, open, pro-enterprise country engaged with the whole world, a kind of globally engaged Britain, not just a Europe-wide set of engagements. And so I wanted to make that positive argument because I felt that that wasn't really being heard in the campaign enough.
41:19 Speaker 03 And, you know, I think there were some really damaging ideas floated, which thankfully... Haven't been implemented, but one in particular that I reacted very negatively to, which was the idea of forcing British companies to make lists of foreign workers and publish them. You know, that that kind of thing is just the direct opposite of what I thought Brexit ought to have been all about.
41:39 Stephen J. Dubner? You wound up supporting Donald Trump in the 2016 election. You've spoken admiringly of Bernie Sanders. Had Sanders been the Democratic candidate, who would you have supported?
41:49 Speaker 03 Well, I just want to make something really clear. I know it sounds like a bit of a kind of semantic distinction, but I think it's an important one. I would never describe myself as supporting Trump. The way I used to put it was that I supported his supporters in the sense that I thought he really articulated the problems that were affecting a really big part of the American population that had been ignored for too long. And I really thought that was a useful service. And I also think, thought then and think now, that some of the specific things that he was arguing for are the right solutions to some of those policies. But I never thought that he had, if you like, a clear agenda for solving the problems that he correctly identified.
42:34 Speaker 03 But as you say, I also thought Bernie Sanders did a great job of that. I think together, those two candidates really shone a spotlight on problems that have been hidden for too long.
42:42 Stephen J. Dubner? Yeah. Had Sanders been the Democratic candidate, would you have gotten behind him in any way, more firmly than Trump on the Republican side?
42:51 Speaker 03 Look, I think that it's difficult because I run a business that's non-partisan. So any kind of intervention in politics at all is tricky. And so I don't think I would have got involved personally too directly, but I think that Bernie Sanders, from the minute that he launched his campaign, I thought, you know what, he's talking exactly the right language and knows what's going on in this country. And I had a lot of sympathy for much of what he said. I'm very strongly of the view that the systems that we have are completely broken. And it's the structures, I think, of the party system, and particularly the financing of all of that, that mean that when people are elected to office, particularly at the federal level, and you see this in Congress, they're so trapped by the way
43:34 Speaker 03 That they got there by the commitments they've made along the way to raise money, to play the party game, that they find it really difficult to actually break free of that and work together as people really want to see, to do sort of, you know, practical, pragmatic solutions to the very real problems we have.
43:50 Stephen J. Dubner? Reading your book and knowing that you're launching this TV show, I think I would be foolish not to at least entertain the thought that you may want to run for office someday, do you?
44:00 Speaker 03 Well, I think that if I had stayed in the UK, I probably would have done that already. I, basically, yes. I don't have a specific plan to do that, but I don't want to dodge your question.
44:12 Stephen J. Dubner? You can be anything but president here, you know that.
44:14 Speaker 03 Okay, very nice. Okay, well, maybe. I have no idea what that looks like yet, but I just don't know when, how, where, and there's no plan.
44:23 Stephen J. Dubner? Now that you've crossed over at least once a week into the fourth estate, or something resembling the fourth estate with your new show, I'm curious to know, do we see, for instance, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump on your show, perhaps together? Do we see your old boss David Cameron on your show? Talk about that for a minute.
44:41 Speaker 03 I'd love to have Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump together. How amazing would that be? I'd love to focus on the areas that they agree about and see if we can put together a plan for positive populism. But I definitely want to try and avoid, if I can, the kind of predictable, argy-bargy, back and forth, kind of yelling at each other that I think is, you know, look, partisans love that, and it's kind of entertaining.
45:08 Stephen J. Dubner? Well, that's what they're paid to do, and that's what they're trained to do. So they really, there isn't much more they...
45:12 Speaker 03 Yes, exactly. So, look, then that's fine. But, you know, once a week, just for an hour, can we please try and have something that's a little bit more constructive and positive?
45:24 Stephen J. Dubner? That was Steve Hilton, his TV show, The Next Revolution, his book, More Human, his attitude. Cautiously optimistic, I'd say. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio.
45:36 Speaker 07 Well, at its core, the CRISPR gene editing technology is now giving human beings the opportunity to change the course of evolution.
45:46 Stephen J. Dubner? Yes, there's room for optimism on this, too, but obviously, tons of caution. I mean, phenotypes are for hookups, but genotype is forever.
45:56 Speaker 07 And I realized with this horror, and I can feel it right now as I'm telling you the story, I feel this chill in my body, that I realized that it was Adolf Hitler.
46:05 Stephen J. Dubner? The science, the economics, even the ethics of the gene editing revolution, that's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky. Our staff also includes Shelley Lewis, Christopher Wirth, Merritt Jacob, Stephanie Tam, Eliza Lambert, Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez. You can and should subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should also check out our archive at Freakonomics.com. You can stream or download every episode we've ever made. You can also read the transcripts, and you can find links to the underlying research.
46:49 Stephen J. Dubner? We can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, et cetera, et cetera, or via email at [email protected] . Thanks for listening.
47:09 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by EverPure. Is the value of AI not living up to the promise? The problem is probably your data, not your AI models. When it's scattered across different systems, getting your data AI-ready is a challenge. You keep your AI waiting, and everything slows down. EverPure unifies your data so you can see it, understand it, and control it all from one simple place, and get it AI-ready fast. Unlock the true value of your AI at everpuredata.com.
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